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WiFi is no longer secure enough to protect wireless data

WiFi is no longer secure enough to protect wireless data.

Global Secure Systems has said that a Russian's firm's use of the latest NVidia graphics cards to accelerate WiFi ‘password recovery' times by up to an astonishing 10,000 per cent proves that WiFi's WPA and WPA2 encryption systems are no longer enough to protect wireless data.

David Hobson, managing director of GSS, claimed that companies can no longer view standards-based WiFi transmission as sufficiently secure against eavesdropping to be used with impunity. He also said that the use of VPNs is arguably now mandatory for companies wanting to comply with the Data Protection Act.

He said: “This breakthrough in brute force decryption of WiFi signals by Elcomsoft confirms our observations that firms can no longer rely on standards-based security to protect their data. As a result, we now advise clients using WiFi in their offices to move on up to a VPN encryption system as well.

“Brute force decryption of the WPA and WPA2 systems using parallel processing has been on the theoretical possibilities horizon for some time - and presumably employed by relevant government agencies in extreme situations - but the use of the latest NVidia cards to speedup decryption on a standard PC is extremely worrying.

“The $64,000 question, of course, is what happens when hackers secure a pecuniary advantage by gaining access to company data flowing across a WPA or WPA2-encrypted wireless connection. Will the Information Commissioner take action against the company concerned for an effective breach of the Data Protection Act.”

ElcomSoft has released a new version its Distributed Password Recovery program for recovering system and document passwords at speeds of up to 1 billion passwords per second. Among the passwords the software can recover are system passwords such as NTLM (Windows logon passwords) and startup passwords, MD5 hashes, password-protected documents created by Microsoft Office 97-2007, PDF files created by Adobe Acrobat, as well as PGP, UNIX, and Oracle.

What’s interesting about the ElcomSoft approach is that the company is using multiple GPU-based video cards such as NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX280 in parallel to process hundreds of billions fixed-point calculations per second. This means, says ElcomSoft, that this release of the Distributed Password Recovery program can try around 5,000 passwords per second for Office 2007 documents with a single GeForce GTX260, while regular Core2Duo processors can only try up to 200 passwords per second.

ElcomSoft claims that all users have to do is insert into a PC video cards (like the GeForce GTX280) to take advantage of the capabilities. Unlike NVIDIA SLI mode (Scan Line Interleaving) that enables transparent use of multiple GPUs, ElcomSoft uses the computational power of several NVIDIA cards no matter if they are of the same kind. Currently supporting all GeForce 8 and GeForce 9 boards, the acceleration technology offloads parts of computational-heavy processing onto the fast and highly scalable processors featured in the NVIDIA’s graphic accelerators.

The acceleration technology developed by ElcomSoft allows the execution of mathematically intensive password recovery code on the massively parallel computational elements found in NVIDIA graphic accelerators. The GPU acceleration is unique to Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery, making password recovery up to 50 times faster compared to password recovery methods that only use the computer’s main CPU.

Interesting, even WPA and WPA2 are easily cracked, the questions are:

-Is it Bruteforce with word lists?
-How long does it actually take, or how many words/second if its wordlist? "1 billion passwords per second" Woot
-Is this method beeing explored as we speak?
-Anyone been working on the "Nvidia" crack new aproach ?

Dude, how many times are you going to post this? Stop spamming the forums.

Of course, if you really wanted to have some fun, go to Wal-Mart late at night and ask the greeter if they could help you find trashbags, roll of carpet, rope, quicklime, clorox and a shovel. See if they give you any strange looks. --Streaker69

It's nothing totally new, but there are more articles about that nowadays.
It compends on your GPU how fast you will crack.
And it is both , wordlist and brute force.
Had a short test about that, and it was *ing fast!
But for myself i don't have 2 highend gpus to use at home

Be sensitive in choosing where you ask your question. You are likely to be ignored, or written off as a loser, if you:

* post your question to a forum where it's off topic
* post a very elementary question to a forum where advanced technical questions are expected, or vice-versa
* cross-post to too many different newsgroups
* post a personal e-mail to somebody who is neither an acquaintance of yours nor personally responsible for solving your problem

In this version a new modules for salted MD5 hashes had been added (the algorithm names are followed by the average per-hash search speeds performed on the GF8800GS video card):
- md5($pass.$salt), 140 million p/s
- md5($salt.$pass), 100 million p/s
- md5(md5($pass).$salt), 86 million p/s
- md5(md5($salt).$pass), 75 million p/s
- md5($salt.md5($pass)), 55 million p/s
- md5($salt.$pass.$salt), 70 million p/s
- md5(md5($salt).md5($pass)), 65 million p/s
- md5(md5($pass).md5($salt)), 65 million p/s

The author said he isnt implemeting WPA/WPA2 crack capibilities its not on his agenda, and no time for Unix implementation !

Sorry Barry, im just trying to info on this subject, you can delete my posts if necessary.

I don't know about your spamming, if this is the case you should listen to Barry because there is nothing worst for a forum that a spammer... This is an interseting discussion though, so keep going on on this particular topic.

First, it's true that there's nothing really new in all this, but the commercial software you're talkin about has released 2 things which are really necessary in wpa cracking.

-Enable GPU usage for wpa cracking. Pyrit can do this under linux, it's a little tool that seems really interesting.

-Enable multiple computers simultaneous online cracking. Airserv-ng is the kind of tool that permit to hope this will also become possible soon under linux.

The fact is, we have possibilities to use GPU & running multiple computers to crack a handshake, but it's a shame that a commercial software permit to use those features so easily... I mean, Aircrack-ng should improve and include in the next versions those kind of functions (I'm quite sure they're already working on this, and it will come) so that everyone could see that we are really moving on the right way about wpa cracking. I have a dream, multiple servers with hundreds of Go wordlists, and thousands of computers connected together to crack wpa passphrases in a few hours...

That is the point. We can't let a commercial software become the best wpa cracking tool. So the right thing to do is not to test this .exe... But to think about the different ways to implement those functionnalities under Backtrack. Stop dreaming, it's time for us to work

--~ Internet is in the air we are breathing, so it should be free for everyone. We'll get there, just wait and see... ~--

Oh, I'm sure the aircrack guys are looking into it. They already work with FPGA arrays, which I believe are similar. I still think it will take a long time to crack a good wpa2 password.

Of course, if you really wanted to have some fun, go to Wal-Mart late at night and ask the greeter if they could help you find trashbags, roll of carpet, rope, quicklime, clorox and a shovel. See if they give you any strange looks. --Streaker69

Of course, a 63 chars long passphrase made with uppercase, lowercase, digits and special chars will still be quite unbreakable. But using CPU + GPU computer processing online with many computers, I really think some 8 to 12 chars long passphrases can be broken. This can be a first step, WPA is strong for now.

--~ Internet is in the air we are breathing, so it should be free for everyone. We'll get there, just wait and see... ~--

"Passwords are like underwear. They should be changed often, and never shared." At least that's what was on my last sys-admin's door.

Of course, if you really wanted to have some fun, go to Wal-Mart late at night and ask the greeter if they could help you find trashbags, roll of carpet, rope, quicklime, clorox and a shovel. See if they give you any strange looks. --Streaker69

"Passwords are like underwear. They should be changed often, and never shared." At least that's what was on my last sys-admin's door.

I get the never share part. But i dont quite get why change it often. I merely keep serveral security degrees of passwords. Some which are mostly for forums are lowsecurity which also is rather simple yet not naivily easily to guess.
Others are basicly a complete random structure of characters including non standard ones which indeed would take ages to bruteforce.

If your password isnt compromised i see no reason in changing it often. Changing it often would just lead to people forgetting thus writing them down on post-its placing it underneath the keyboard.

I get the never share part. But i dont quite get why change it often. I merely keep serveral security degrees of passwords. Some which are mostly for forums are lowsecurity which also is rather simple yet not naivily easily to guess.
Others are basicly a complete random structure of characters including non standard ones which indeed would take ages to bruteforce.

If your password isnt compromised i see no reason in changing it often. Changing it often would just lead to people forgetting thus writing them down on post-its placing it underneath the keyboard.

Well if they get you handshake, then there's the off chance they will actually break it. If you never change it, they have it. Now if you change it once a month, by the time they crack it, it's different. Same with most passwords, eventually a brute force application might get lucky.

Of course, if you really wanted to have some fun, go to Wal-Mart late at night and ask the greeter if they could help you find trashbags, roll of carpet, rope, quicklime, clorox and a shovel. See if they give you any strange looks. --Streaker69